I’m a contributor – I did Kafka’s The Castle, Agatha Christie’s Giant’s Bread, and Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride for this launch – and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.
First-time contributors should select something from the appropriate section, because that gives you the greatest chance of succeeding and the least burden on our reviewers as you get started.
Our toolset has a help wanted section and some outstanding issues: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools#help-wanted
Also thanks for doing this, I've read a bunch of stuff (GK Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett) that I wouldn't have otherwise if it weren't for this service.
We also require that the art have some kind of connection to the book itself, so it's not just some random fine art. Sometimes the connection is a little fuzzy, but we do the best we can given that art must be pre-1930 and also must have been previously published.
(My personal favorite artwork selection of the books I worked on is The Communist Manifesto[1]. That painting was actually made specifically for a different book by Willa Cather[2], but I thought the peasant laborer, holding a sickle in one hand, with a faraway look in her eyes as the red sun rises behind her was just too good to pass up for Marx!)
1920ish was when it started becoming much more common for books to have illustrated dust jackets, so now that more books from that era and onwards are entering the public domain, we opt to use the first edition dust jacket if it's in the appropriate style. Fortunately for us, that era also happens to be the so-called Golden Age of Illustration so it's not hard finding beautiful art to use!
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karl-marx_friedrich-engels...
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/willa-cather/the-song-of-t...
Do you know if the project try to look at other languages at all?
We do have a default typography across all our works (the “Standard” in “Standard Ebooks” refers to a standard imprint; think Penguin) but we usually retain specific famous things where possible in a reflowable format. For example, the Mouse’s Tail in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,[1] or the letter in E. A. Poe’s “Thou Art the Man”.[2]
We don’t take on other languages, no. Our tooling[3] and style guides[4] are tailored specifically to English. Absolutely nothing stopping another project from forking the codebase (it’s GPL-3) and giving it a go.
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lewis-carroll/alices-adven...
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict...
Something I am rather familiar with is brought out by your mention of the German edition/title; that the continental market seems to generally produce books that are far more densely formatted, i.e., smaller font and typesetting, thinner pages, and leading to overall tighter book formats. I actually appreciate it when, e.g., a book is 1/2 the size and weight, and usually also made far more durably; but it will invariably compromise any author intention related to the arrangement of the lettering.
Maybe you can confirm that based on what seems to be your English and German editions of the same novel.
The German and Swedish editions I read were similarly typeset, and the first scan I found in English felt similar. What I wanted to know was if there was some thought into it, because the website is nicely designed so striving for a unique typesetting strategy could be a goal.
I found it amusing, considering all those memes about German words with 35 letters each.
And, as I get older, I began to consider letter size relevant to choose a book edition. Gave up buying new books and went for used, older editions with bigger letters.
Apart from that, they produce nice editions.
I tried to find a policy page on this via a standardebooks.org site search but nothing looked relevant.
I’m asking after realizing that some of my favorite books were books where the ebook had intentional font choices, for example different fonts for chapter titles vs body text, fonts that matched the vibe of the book (historical, more modern, etc.) It would be nice if more ebook readers made it easy to import more than the ~8 fonts they include by default but the next best thing is when the book itself includes a great font.
1. renders the cover as a JPG from the native SVG
2. converts more complicated selectors (e.g. :nth-of-type, :empty, etc.) to classes and class selectors
3. renders MathML as images
4. renders SVGs as images
…and a bunch more things to make it work better with older ereaders, which tend hang around for a long time.
It’s worth pointing out that the Kobo builds are closer to the “advanced” build as they have great native support for MathML and SVG. But the build step adds in a bunch of Kobo-specific markup to make it work better there.
In my experience, Apple Books does the best with the advanced builds, but it doesn’t support SVG covers so you end up with autogenerated ones, which seems a shame. I’ve sent a couple of feedback issues to them over the years, but if anyone else wants to also do this feel free.
Regardless, my understanding of copyright is that people broadly get annoyed when you infringe by distribution. In this case the distribution didn’t happen until the copyright had expired. People preparing these projects for later launch do it purely on their own machines, and nothing arrives at Standard Ebooks until the day of release.
The last point is why the Beatrix Potter compilation I did ended up with illustrations: the text specifically references the illustrations in a couple of the books (“Can you see…?”) so they remained. It did mean writing 602 pieces of alt text though[1] so it was a fairly major undertaking to include them.
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/beatrix-potter/short-ficti...
It would be neat to see those editions show up in when browsing collections in apps like Libby or Overdrive (at least in the U.S.).
You can run their EPUB through Pandoc to convert yourself, or put some effort in and setup your own Calibre instance which will do something similar when you ask it to.
One of the SE editors experimented with turning SE ebooks into PDFs, though. See more about that here: https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/Xy2bwiexLeM/m/f...
When will they start assigning catalog numbers to each of their works in the way that Project Guteneberg does? I'd like a unique id per ebook and since you don't (for obvious reasons) use ISBNs, there's nothing really to be done. I can't use an OCLC id because Standard Ebooks aren't consistently listed in Worldcat, I can't use Bookbrainz or Open Library ids for the same reason.
It costs nothing and is a low-effort fix. It's been an industry (and library science) thing for decades or longer. Can Standard Ebooks finally stop the amateur hour crap?